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The Importance of Framing Community Value for Executive Buy-In

February 25, 2025 By Jim Storer

As community leaders, one of our biggest challenges is conveying the importance of our community ecosystems to executives, especially when it comes to securing funding for growth. Framing the community narrative in a way that ties community engagement and activity directly to business goals is essential for demonstrating value and converting skeptics into enthusiastic advocates.

A Growing Ability to Prove Value

This year, a promising 34% of respondents indicate they can effectively prove the value of their community, a significant increase from just 20% last year. Among the best-in-class segment, the percentage is even higher, showcasing a trend towards greater accountability. However, it’s concerning to note that 21% of this top-tier segment and 32% of all respondents are still unsure or unable to articulate their community’s value. This gap signifies the importance of making value accountability a priority as we move into 2025.

Framing Community Value for Executive Buy-In

The Challenges of Measuring ROI

Calculating the ROI of community programs remains a complex task, and in 2024, we saw a decline in confidence, with only 37% of respondents claiming they could measure it, down from 53% in 2023. Even the best-in-class teams are struggling compared to previous years, which may be attributed to reduced team sizes and changes in available resources. To support your members in finding the answers they need, we recommend utilizing tools like the Community ROI Calculator.

Who’s Responsible for Community Metrics?

A key insight from this year’s survey highlights who is responsible for collecting, analyzing, and reporting on community metrics. The data shows that community managers are typically the primary individuals handling these tasks. However, in the best-in-class cohort, there’s a notable distinction: they are twice as likely to have team members dedicated to metrics or analysts from other departments. This specialized focus is crucial since analyzing community metrics requires a different skill set compared to typical community management tasks. Teams that designate specific roles for metric analysis and reporting are likely to be more successful in capturing the true impact of their communities. It’s a sound strategy for community leaders to carve out this time and responsibility for dedicated individuals within their teams.

As community professionals, we must prioritize demonstrating the value of our communities in ways that resonate with organizational objectives. By focusing on robust data collection and analysis, we can enhance our narrative and gain the executive support necessary to foster growth and engagement in our community ecosystems.

Recommendations

Invest in Analyst Resources. Prioritize acquiring dedicated analyst resources, either through hiring or by leveraging existing expertise within the organization.

Expand Reporting Scope. Distribute community reports to a wider range of stakeholders to increase organizational awareness and demonstrate the value of community initiatives. Tailor reports to specific audience’s needs to ensure relevance and impact.

Focus on Value. Develop a clear methodology for calculating community value, considering both quantitative metrics and qualitative insights. Align metrics with business goals and communicate value in a compelling and understandable way.

Explore more community trends in the 2024 State of Community Management report.

Building a Cost Impact Model for Community Growth

January 30, 2025 By Jim Storer

Esri is the global market leader in geographic information system (GIS) software, location intelligence, and mapping.

The Esri Community Team uses data-driven models to power community-centric initiatives, and align community efforts with the company’s mission, vision, and values.

Despite having high engagement and satisfied members, the Esri Community team struggled to get organization-wide buy-in for expanded community use cases.

Learn how the Esri Community Team built a Cost Impact Model for their online community program and design an impact model of your own in this community case study.

Download the Esri Case Study

More Community Case Studies

  • Eight Ways to Improve Your Online Community Programs

    Eight Ways to Improve Your Online Community Programs

  • Building a Strong Foundation: The Importance of Policies and Governance in Community Management 

    Building a Strong Foundation: The Importance of Policies and Governance in Community Management 

  • No Question Left Behind: Transforming Community Engagement Through Effective Communication

    No Question Left Behind: Transforming Community Engagement Through Effective Communication

  • Scalable Self-Service in Online Communities

    Scalable Self-Service in Online Communities

  • How I’m Using AI as a Community Manager

    How I’m Using AI as a Community Manager

  • The Power of Metrics: Enhancing Community Engagement at ISTE+ASCD

  • Building a Mobile-First Community to Meet Members Where They Are

    Building a Mobile-First Community to Meet Members Where They Are

  • Nurturing a Thriving Community: Insights from UiPath

    Nurturing a Thriving Community: Insights from UiPath

  • Enhancing Community Engagement with Amelie: An Innovative AI Mascot Initiative at Microsoft

    Enhancing Community Engagement with Amelie: An Innovative AI Mascot Initiative at Microsoft

  • Building a Cost Impact Model for Community Growth

    Building a Cost Impact Model for Community Growth

Four Ways to Improve Community Reporting

May 23, 2023 By Jim Storer

Ready to level up your community reporting program? Whether you’re a solo practitioner or you lead a team of community professionals we have four ways you can immediately improve your community reporting program, opening the door to increased resourcing, support, and growth,

1. Make time for metrics.

We know you’re busy. Collecting, analyzing, and reporting metrics is a specialized skill many community managers don’t have time for but you either have to make the time, or outsource this work as community reporting is critical to the health and growth of you community program. . Maturing community programs should look for this skill beyond the core team to leverage existing expertise vs. trying to bring it in house. Community reporting ownership is increasingly moving to a specialized role on the community team, or in larger organizations, into a reporting organization that works across the company. While not every community has the budget for this, specialized reporting roles can lead to increased resources.

2. Understand the metrics’ audience and report accordingly.

What’s important to a business operations manager differs completely from that of an executive. Design reports with the end user in mind. Add a “why this is important” section to provide important contextual information. As communities mature, organizations want to see the value for the business (at a minimum), and the return on investment (ROI) – but the detail with which you provide this information can and should vary depending on your intended audience.

3. Flush out long-time inactive accounts.

Much like a database, communities should be cleaned up periodically. Remove people who haven’t returned to the community in a set time period (varies by community). Maintaining inactives can negatively impact your other metrics.

Community expert Dianne Kibbey, Global Head/VP of Community and Social Media at Newark Electronics shared this perspective:

Companies in general measure inactive members in very different ways, but it’s important to understand that an inactive member and a lurker are not the same. A lurker could be someone who’s indirectly active in the community, maybe they don’t engage in conversation, but they’re definitely aware of what’s going on at some point.

As an external community, we’re there to serve a purpose: getting an answer, downloading a piece of content. A member may find what they’re looking for, and they may then become inactive. We regularly clean up inactive [users] or try and re-engage them in another activity. It was a really interesting thing to see this year that everyone’s looking at these inactives and figuring out what to do about them, but it’s not necessarily a negative.

4. Get with the times.

Stop citing the 90-9-1 rule for community engagement. Instead, use the 55-25-20 Rule as a new benchmark. The 90-9-1 Rule, coined in 2006, explains behaviors exhibited in large online collaboration communities (like Wikipedia). It doesn’t apply to today’s niche topic or business use case focused communities. Instead, there’s a new engagement rule — backed by years of research — that better fits today’s online communities. Based on over a decade of research, a well- managed online community sees the following in a given month:

community reporting
  • 20% of members are actively creating content
  • 25% are validating and consuming content
  • 55% are inactive

Welcome to the new normal.

Growing Organizational Interest in Community Metrics

May 22, 2023 By Jim Storer

The Metrics & Measurement competency of The Community Maturity Model™ helps organizations understand the “why” of social approaches and the results they see when they do. Community teams are often responsible for collecting, analyzing, and reporting back to the organization, which evolves as the community grows. The same occurs as a community program matures: Beginning with activity metrics and anecdotal evidence of behavior change to more performance and behavior-based metrics.

When The Community Roundtable launched in 2009, community managers were responsible for almost everything associated with their community program. As time passed the role changed leading to the creation of the Community Skills Framework™, which highlights five skill families, each with ten skills.

Community Manager Skills


Keeping the Community Skills Framework™ in mind, seeing community metric ownership move from the community manager to a specialist — on the team or elsewhere in the organization — is exciting. On larger teams (or in more mature communities), this work is done by a part-time or dedicated person on the core team (27% in 2022 vs 19% in 2021). Smaller teams often fill this role by someone outside the core team with these specific skills (10% in 2022 vs 7% in 2021).

Gone are the days when communities shared little beyond the core team and executive sponsor.

As more outsiders help the community team report successes via community metrics, the number of “eyeballs” receiving community program reports increases. This trend supports earlier findings that community programs are on their way to becoming a key operational unit. 2022’s respondents reported increased external stakeholder interest in community metrics from senior executives and HR leaders. Boards of directors’ interest stayed consistent year over year.

For those respondents who provided no reporting, if it’s too early to start sharing activity or behavior metrics due to your community’s age, capture examples of new and/or valuable behavior with screenshots. Have an older community? Identify metrics supporting the business use case to start and grow from there. Sharing the community’s impacts on business leads to gained influence and the resources needed to grow your program.

Proving the Value of Community Metrics: Making Strides

As communities mature, organizations want to see the value for the business (at a minimum), and the return on investment (ROI). The last two years’ responses in these areas are promising. There’s been a modest increase in communities proving their value, with even more headed that way. Every community — even young ones — needs to document successes with proving ROI in mind.

ROI is crucial for community managers, as it’s a language business leaders understand. The Community ROI Calculator provides an easy- to-explain framework to show ROI based on a valuable community behavior: Asking and answering questions. With this approach, key constituents in the organization discuss and agree on the value of a community answer, and then it’s simple math from there.
This year’s respondents were less likely to be able to calculate ROI than those in 2021, but they’re actively working on the calculation. Based on collected anecdotal evidence, there’s no reason to believe value in calculating community ROI is decreasing. Instead, those who are in the “no” and “don’t know” categories should try the Community ROI Calculator.

community roi community metrics
Click to Calculate Your Community ROI

Using metrics to understand community growth and business impact

January 17, 2023 By Guest User

Note: This guest post is sponsored content from Common Room. Learn more here.

As community leaders dive into 2023, we want to offer them ideas for showcasing the impact their work has on the business. Aligning on the right metrics with stakeholders is a great place to begin. If you’re not sure where you and your stakeholders’ goals and community vision intersect, use this free 5-question self-guided alignment assessment. 

Connecting community growth to business goals

Business-wise, the value of a thriving community comes from strategically applying community initiatives to business goals. At its core, community-led growth is about finding creative ways to use community channels to empower product users with deeper knowledge, support customer acquisition, increase retention, create opportunities for upsells, and more.

When executed well, community-led growth boosts nearly every department across the organization:

  • Support and success teams can meet users where they are to address bugs and issues in customer experiences.
  • Marketing teams can create messaging and content that’s specifically tailored to the community’s needs.
  • Sales departments can identify prospects with high intent and bring increased context and value to sales calls.
  • Product and engineering teams can get direct product feedback and learn what features users want next.

Success can be difficult to prove to stakeholders across an organization when it’s not measured—this is why metrics are so important to community-led growth efforts.

What metrics can tell us about community health and growth

Community growth is a long-term investment with compound interest. To make more strategic choices, what data do you need?

There are four main categories of metrics that community leaders should consider:

  1. Membership
  2. Engagement
  3. Responsiveness
  4. Business impact

Membership

Membership metrics provide insight into the makeup of your community and help you quantify your reach.

Useful metrics in this category are:

  • Member headcount is a staple of community growth metrics because more people means more perspectives, knowledge, and reach. 
  • Understanding members’ role types is important, as teams may need to engage differently with prospects, current customers, and influencers.

Measuring membership metrics over time gives you insight into the overall growth of your community, and getting to know your members more deeply offers insights into topics they’re most interested in, commonly shared pain points, and how to provide the most value.

Engagement

Engagement metrics indicate whether or not members and prospects get value from participating.

Useful metrics in this category are:

  • The total number of posts across channels. 
  • The ratio of observers to active participants can give insight into how welcome, interested, and empowered members feel.
  • The percentage of members who qualify as product champions can indicate how likely it is that your most satisfied customers will advocate for your product.
  • Understanding trending topics is key to knowing what’s hot (or not) in your community. Topics can spark content production ideas, factor into sales conversations, and inform product development.

Check your engagement metrics often. With this data, you’ll be better able to course-correct before spending resources on community initiatives that aren’t a good fit. If engagement is low, it’s an indicator of disconnect. Adrian Speyer discusses ways to re-engage a stagnant community in this live author Q&A. 

Responsiveness

Responsiveness metrics help you understand how valued and supported your community members feel.

Useful metrics in this category are:

  • Your response rate, or what percentage of members’ posts receive replies.
  • Median response time, or how long it takes for someone to respond to a post, can greatly affect the flow of conversation.
  • The ratio of community responses to team member responses is important because dynamic interactions between members (and employees!) are what makes a community.

Responsiveness metrics provide interesting insight into how your community feels. If you’re looking to boost engagement, offering quick responses to posts can create a sense of organic conversation. If you notice your team is responding the most, look for ways to encourage members to chime in.

Business impact

If you can’t tie the impact of community to overarching business goals, you won’t be able to drive your business forward through community-led growth.

Useful metrics in this category are:

  • Customer acquisition gets a boost from a thriving community because it creates opportunities for prospects to engage with product advocates, and it helps them get questions/objections addressed quickly.
  • Retention improves when customers have access to more information, templates, and use cases, ensuring they have everything they need to get the most value from your product.
  • Account expansion is made possible when members share innovative ways to use your product, opening users’ eyes to greater value opportunities.
  • Community-attributed revenue is revenue from an organization whose members engaged in the community before they appeared in your CRM or marketing automation system. Being able to share this number is one of the best ways to demonstrate the impact of community on the business.

Proving community ROI can look different from one business to the next, and it’s critical to determine which goals you’re trying to achieve in order to make informed decisions about where you should focus your efforts and how to track your progress.

Intelligent community growth platforms

Layering data-based insights across your community channels is what we call intelligent community growth. Instead of manually pulling metrics, use an intelligent community growth platform like Common Room that aggregates data from across your community channels, social sites, and CRM to provide a holistic view of the members and activity in your community and enables reporting that gives you visibility into the metrics that matter for your community and organization, allowing you to draw a straight line from your community work to the impact it has on the business. We can’t wait to see how you engage and support your community in 2023.

The full version of this post was originally published on the Common Room blog on December 8. For more insights about community metrics and benchmarks, check out our free 360: Community-Led Growth Report.

Impactful Metrics & Reporting in Community

July 27, 2022 By Jim Storer

Great metrics and dashboards reveal the value of engagement.

Choosing the metrics that tell your community’s unique story of engagement is crucial. What engagement activity is worth measuring? It depends on the strategic, operational, and tactical goals of your community.

Community engagement metrics help to tie engagement to outcomes, and in turn, to business value. Engagement data should be tailored to its audience, ensuring that community metrics are meaningful. For instance, a product manager and a market director may both be interested in the emergent product testimonials in a community, but they are interested in this data for different reasons – and are likely to use it in different ways.

While the product manager may want to understand how the product is used in order to improve the product, the marketing director may be interested in what aspects of the product members are most excited about so they can share it with others. Deciding what data to share, how to present it, and how often, is critical to telling the story of your community in a meaningful way. More importantly, reporting data effectively is what leads to increased support and investment. We break metrics and reporting into three categories: strategic, operational, and tactical.

Strategic Metrics & Reporting in Community

Strategic metrics and reporting is focused on impact and value. How does the community further the strategic objectives of the organization? Why is it a better investment than a more traditional approach to addressing those issues? Senior executives are responsible for budgets, which reflect how the priorities of an organization are expressed and changed.

This is why measuring community ROI becomes important – because it demonstrates effective impact. If organizational change is a strategic goal, showing how communities address organizational change more effectively, for the same investment than another approach, is critical. When reporting on the significant value community brings to company culture, executives who look beyond the revenue benefits will find that the complex problems community solves creates value not only for the bottom line but also for the brand, the employees, and the stakeholders. Community investments are an investment in long-term fiscal health, innovation, and a positive customer experience.

Strategic Metrics & Reporting in Community
An example of a strategic metric is Return on Investment (ROI) – Use our ROI Calculator to calculate your community ROI.

Operational Metrics & Reporting In Community

Operational metrics are focused on how behaviors and workflows are changing. Behavior change is what collectively generates strategic value. Knowing which behaviors are changing, how fast, and in what areas of the community is critical to understanding how to encourage the spread of positive behaviors and discourage the negative ones.

Operational metrics help decision-makers monitor how well plans are working so they can learn and adjust as needed. If behaviors over a quarter don’t change, then it may prompt a change to how the community is being managed – or when looking at benchmarks over time, it may just signal a traditionally slow period in the life of the community.

Done well, operational metrics help:

  • See the gaps and opportunities
  • Probe deeper into whether a management approach is working
  • Celebrate good performance and reflect on what is working well

Tactical Metrics & Reporting in Community

Tactical metrics are the day-to-day activity measures that help community managers understand the direct impact of their actions. How many new comments happen after a question of the week is posted? What percent of the community comes back after newsletters go out? Are those metrics better or worse than prior periods, which can tell the community team if the quality of their efforts is improving?

Done well, tactical metrics help

  • Understand what content and programming works
  • Identify times and periods that have different engagement levels
  • See how changes in management influence engagement

Three recommendations for more effective engagement

Measure: Engagement data is vital to understanding who, how, and when members engage. Identifying key behaviors when designing metrics will help the organization understand how engagement impacts work. Translating this impact into value makes it meaningful to the business.

Analyze: Combine data and member research to understand why members engage – and how it impacts their success. Use this analysis to create user stories that resonate for both users and internal stakeholders so everyone can see the impact

Act: Use your understanding of member activity and behaviors to build successful patterns into community programs, functionality, and management approaches. Experiment to see what works.

If you run a community, don’t think like a website on metrics

April 30, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

As we continue to slice and dice the data from more than 200 communities for the State of Community Management 2015, we know that one of the most viewed pieces of the report will be the engagement profiles – the percentage of members who are lurking, contributing, creating and collaborating in the community. It’s a natural thing, especially for new communities, to want to look at engagement and growth metrics early as a way to show to people the success of the community.

Jousting at Hever Castle, Kent (5) - geograph.org.uk - 1453366

Is this constructive engagement?

When you focus on engagement and growth, though, it defines your tactics in ways that may not benefit the long-term health of the community. In the recently published Community Manager Handbook: 20 Lessons from Community Superheroes, we highlighted some alternatives to basic engagement and growth metrics we are drawn toward – the kinds of metrics that might get more effectively at how your community will perform long term.

Think about these kinds of metrics:

Engagement depth – Can you demonstrate that members asking good questions and having real discussions? Many “engagement tactics” lead to one-and-done kinds of engagement, which boost your numbers now, but will come back to haunt you later.

Member satisfaction – Satisfied members are much more likely to come back than those who come, engage, and depart unsatisfied. Surprisingly, new communities often don’t prioritize finding out if members are satisfied. You shouldn’t reshape your strategy for every complaint and question, but knowing how people are feeling about the community is crucial in moving forward.

Membership referrals and renewals – If your members are renewing and referring new members – they must like what you do. If your members are becoming advocates – you’re doing something right! Getting member referrals and renewals tells you that your members don’t just have to be there, they want to be there.

Signs of changing behavior – By the time you begin, you should have a sense of the behaviors you expect from members. Are they moving toward your behavioral goals? If not, it’s easier to change behaviors in a small community than a large one, so now is the time.

These metrics are sometimes more difficult to measure, but using your community goals to drive the metrics you use, rather than just “doing the basics” can help ensure you’re looking at what defines a valuable community, as opposed to a popular website.

Community Maturity and Measurement are Linked

May 1, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

We have been overwhelmed by the response to the State of Community Management 2014! We love hearing everyone’s take on the data, so please keep your tweets, blog posts, articles and reviews coming. This week I’m excited to highlight one of our key findings from the SOCM 2014 in this week’s community fact #2 – maturity and measurement are linked. 

​For many years, community management has been more of an art than a science. That is – the community management discipline has changed as organizations apply more process to the role and its responsibilities. It follows that those who have applied more process are seeing more results – and newer communities are in many cases more mature than those started 3-4 years ago because they are able to make use of emerging knowledge of community practices.

​ Of those with the most mature processes – the best-in-class (the top 20%) in this year’s report, 85% can measure the value of their communities vs. 48% for the average community.

SOCM Fact #2

 

You can review more findings related to community maturity in the State of Community Management 2014. This post is the second in a 10-part series highlighting some of the most thought-provoking data from the SOCM 2014 – brought to you via a fun poster – perfect for sharing on Twitter, hanging at your desk, or printing out and waving around your next community strategy meeting.

You can access the whole report here:

The State of Community Management 2014 from The Community Roundtable

​

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